The service provider environment is going through unprecedented change, requiring service providers to respond quickly to new market trends in order to stay competitive, monetize new services and drive optimization while continuing to deliver “carrier class” services ubiquitously.

Additionally, the increased emphasis on cloud computing is placing new demands on the network. For cloud services to be seamless, the underlying network must be intelligent, carrier-class and virtualized.

But as the saying goes, with change comes opportunity, and for partners the evolving service provider market opportunity is huge. Just how big are we talking? Take a look at the figures below.

These numbers only address the pure technology opportunities; the Internet of Everything (IoE) is the other key ingredient to this story, an opportunity estimated at $19 trillion. Today, 70 percent of people and 99 percent of things are not connected. As new industries emerge around IoE, the solutions that will be introduced will need service providers to provide the connectivity and often times the value-added services. Read More »

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when someone talks to you about Policy? Chances are, you think of rules and regulations telling you about what you cannot do while on a mobile app or online. You don’t think about Policy as a way to set you free or a way for your Service Provider to make things better for you.

Graham Finnie from Heavy Reading discusses in his new whitepaper, “Policy as a Platform: Delivering Agility & Simplicity,” how policy and charging control has come a long way in a few short years.

By Lisa Garza, Cisco Service Provider Marketing, Mobility Solutions Everything old is new again, and that’s true for voice over Wi-Fi. When Apple announced support for Wi-Fi calling on the new iPhone 6 this fall, a new hype cycle was born. In the most extreme cases some industry players are claiming the resulting death of residential licensed small cells. As in most technology introductions, the truth will unfold over time as the technology is applied in the real world. If voice over Wi-Fi were a simple panacea, then we would all Read More »

There is immense parental pride in seeing your child receive her University diploma. As I watched my daughter walk across the stage on the campus quad last year, bittersweet thoughts floated by – she’ll be leaving the family nest, striking out on her own, facing the challenges of finding a job, moving into her own apartment, paying bills. It was sad to think of innocence lost, and the real world barking at her door. With these thoughts I embraced her, and then she said “Dad, guess what, I’ve decided that I’m gonna do a gap year in New Zealand and Australia!”

A “gap year” is a way to defer all those serious milestones I was imagining for my daughter by taking a year off to travel and do fun things. Oh, and could I also take care of her cat, her car, and start making her college loan payments while she was gone? Oh well, I was actually very happy – and envious – about her quest for self-discovery.

So we shifted focus to new challenges, like getting travel medical insurance, selecting the right backpack, managing money needs, where to find jobs along the way, getting temporary work visas. And what about keeping in touch? I looked at my mobile operator’s roaming rates, and saw that Read More »

I had the pleasure of visiting this vibrant island country while we were filming this video. The Republic of Malta sits in the Mediterranean south of Sicily and north of Libya, a strategic crossroads with a visible history that dates back to thousands of years BC. Some of the oldest standing temples in Malta pre-date the Egyptian Pyramids by a millennium.

What a joy, then, to experience the thoroughly modern nation that Malta has become, thanks in part to the vision of the telecommunications provider Melita. The name Melita itself reflects the long history of the country – thought to derive from an ancient Greek word for “honey-sweet”, reflecting a unique species of bees that are found in Malta. Read More »

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